A Burundian Meal

Just a few days ago I was in a small central African country known the Republic of Burundi…

OK, not literally! I was transported there through a delicious Burundian meal.

A few months ago, an Indian lady from Burundi came to the Studio, keen to take up some of the courses we were offering. Her passion for cooking, bubbly spirit and amusing stories soon led her to become good friends with her course mates and the entire APB team.

Curious about the tiny, little-heard-of country she’d migrated to several years ago, everyone asked her eagerly about the food of Burundi.

And in response to this, she decided that before she went home from Mumbai she would cook us a Burundian meal!

Burundi is a really tiny, poor, landlocked country in the southeastern region of Africa, with limited variety of vegetables and food crops. The staple foods of the country are Mogo tuber, Maragi, and corn.

Our meal began with light golden Mogo fritters. Mogo, aka Cassava, is a tuber similar to sweet potato, but not as sweet. Sticks of Mogo were simply deep fried, and sprinkled with salt, chili powder and limejuice. They were slightly crisp on the outside and had tender crumbly layers inside. So delicious by themselves that we were eating them straight out of the fryer!

Traditionally, Mogo is ground into flour and cooked into a porridge similar to Polenta or the Gujarati Khichu, but like some of the day’s other offerings, our chef served us her own modified versions of the traditional Burundian foods.

For the main course we had Maragi curry, and corn on the cob in a coconut milk gravy.

Maragi is a red bean very close to the Indian rajma. The curry made from it too, is quite similar to our rajma curry, with a fried onion and tomato base, and spiced with chili. However, here, the spice-inducing weapon of choice is paste of the fiery Pili pili chili (aka Piri piri in South Africa). Just two teaspoons was enough to spice up the large pot-full to feed 10!

In Burundi the primary cooking fat is a crude palm oil. When our cook had previously described this oil to us I hadn’t fathomed just how brightly vermillion it was! It was used in the Maragi curry, and it dyed all the onions a magnificent amber!

Apart from its hue, this oil also had a very notable, somewhat earthy flavour (the flavour of coconut oil is the closest thing I could compare it to, but that still doesn’t quite capture it) that is quite enjoyable. And luckily so, because even with all the tomatoes, chili and maragi beans in the curry, this flavour beamed through in the final dish! I’d say it was this one flavour that differentiated the Maragi curry from rajma curry.

Traditionally this maragi gravy is eaten with morsels of the mogo porridge, but it was served to us with steamed rice. (I think this reflected the confluence of Burundian and Indian culture in our chef.)

The second curry we were served was corn on the cob in ground peanut and coconut milk gravy. Here too, the coconut milk was an Indian touch, as coconuts are not easily available in landlocked Burundi. Nonetheless, it was an indulgently creamy curry, with dimensions of sweetness and tang from some sautéed onions and tomatoes. Although it was very heavy, it was difficult to stop eating, and I must have taken two or three helpings, each time telling myself, “just a liiiiittle more…”

It was a delicious meal, and its safe to say my tummy was ready to explode from overeating!